Current News and Events

Booking

Guided tours can be booked by contacting the Education Department of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. We advise you to book your tour as early as possible by using our booking form .

Subscribing to the Newsletter

E-mail address

Our newsletter informs visitors on up-to-date exhibitions, contemporary witness reports and important dates and details. To subscribe, please place your E-Mail address in the box given above and then click “Subscribe”. You`ll find already published editions here.

Max Mannheimer (1920-2016)

On September 23,
2016, Max Mannheimer died at the age of 96. Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial
Site mourns for this man, who like no other put his all into the struggle to
keep the memory of the Holocaust from being forgotten, while at the same time
acting as a conciliator. It was in 1985 that Max Mannheimer, who was born in
Neutitschein (now Nový Jičín) in Moravia, first published an article in the
“Dachauer Hefte” on the story of his persecution and subsequent concentration
camp imprisonment.

Max Mannheimer was
the eldest of five children in a merchant’s family. The family first experienced
concentrated anti-Semitic violence when the Sudetenland was annexed to the
German Reich in September 1938. Nazi persecution caught up with them six months
after moving to the as yet unoccupied part of Czechoslovakia when German troops
invaded that region, as well. From then on, Max Mannheimer was forced to work
at hard labor building roads. He met his first wife, Eva, and they married in September
1942.

The entire family was deported by way of Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in
1943. Max Mannheimer’s parents, his sister, one of his brothers, and his wife
were murdered shortly thereafter. In October 1943, Max and Edgar Mannheimer,
the only survivors of the formerly large family, were brought to the ruins of
Warsaw, where a concentration camp had been set up to force Jewish prisoners to
remove what remained of the demolished Jewish ghetto. The brothers performed
forced labor there until August 1944 and were finally sent on to Dachau
Concentration Camp, where they were deployed in several subcamps. At the camp
in the municipality of Karlsfeld, which was located in the subcamp complex of
Allach and was marked by disastrous hygiene, Max Mannheimer was put to hard
labor carrying bundles of iron. He was even forced to take the bodies of his
fellow prisoner who had died to the crematorium in Dachau on a wagon.

In February 1945, the SS moved
him to the subcamp, where he was
able to rejoin his brother Edgar, which proved to be essential to his survival.
Soon Max Mannheimer came down with typhoid fever and languished for weeks with
thousands of other Jewish prisoners in the local infirmary until it was
evacuated. The final deportation began for him on April 26, 1945, when he was
taken through many dangers to Lake Starnberg, where he was freed.

The loss of nearly
his entire family left a deep mark on Max Mannheimer. Again and again, he was
plagued by traumatic memories. Starting in the 1950s, his artistic work enabled
him to escape these torturous thoughts. In remembrance of his father, he signed
his paintings “ben jakov”, son of Jacob.

Immediately after
the war, Max Mannheimer had at first intended to leave Germany. Years later, he
made it his life’s work to combat right-wing radicalism and anti-Semitism. He
became a key authority in the national discourse on the war. From the 1980s on,
he worked tirelessly to keep the memory of the victims of the Nazi regime alive.
“You are not responsible for what happened. But you certainly are responsible
for preventing it from happening again.” In his work as an eyewitness of the
period, Max Mannheimer did not go into schools to judge or accuse, but rather
to enlighten – accusations against later generations were foreign to him. Max
Mannheimer was committed to the work of the Dachau Concentration Camp community
and remained its chairman from 1988 until his death. At the same time, he was
Vice President of the Comité International de Dachau (International Dachau
Committee).

The Dachau
Concentration Camp Memorial Site is in deep mourning. “We will never forget his
efforts for Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, his untiring commitment to
setting up the Jugendgästehaus (youth guest house) in Dachau, his work for the
‘Gegen Vergessen für Demokratie’ (“against forgetting, for democracy”)
association, and not least his own very personal, endearing and yet tenacious
manner, which enabled him to achieve his goals. The memorial site and its staff
are mourning the loss of their good friend,” said the Director of Dachau
Concentration Camp Memorial Site, Dr. Gabriele Hammermann.

Max Mannheimer was
honored with many awards for his activities: he received the “Chevalier de la
Légion d´Honneur” from the Republic of France in 1993, the “Waldemar-von-Knoeringen“
Award from the Georg von Vollmar Academy
in 1994, an honorary doctorate from the Ludwig Maximilan University in Munich
in 2000, the Wilhelm Hoegner Award from the Bavarian SPD party in 2008, the
Karlspreis der Sudetendeutschen Landsmannschaft (European award of the Sudeten
German Homeland Association) in 2012, and in the same year the Commander’s
Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2010, the
study center at the Dachau Jugendgästehaus was named after him.

His death has left us terribly bereaved. Our thoughts also go out to his
family, his companions, and his friends. A book of condolences is available for
signing at Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site.